Born on the Day the Empire Arrived: August 10, 1898, Lorenzo Tañada, and the Long Filipino Argument With America
Born on the Day the Empire Arrived: August 10, 1898, Lorenzo Tañada, and the Long Filipino Argument With America
American and Spanish officers spent August 10, 1898 arranging a fake battle to hand over Manila while the Filipino army that had already surrounded the city was locked out of it. That same day, in a coastal town in Tayabas, a boy was born who would spend the next ninety-three years arguing with the empire that arrived on his birthday.
I grew up in Marikina, and I did not know until I was much older that one of the greatest Filipinos of the twentieth century is buried there. Lorenzo Martinez Tañada — Ka Tanny — lies at Loyola Memorial Park beside his wife Expedita, where we buried my Lola Rosita in 1978. I've visited her there in Loyola each time I came home to Marikina.
What I also did not know is the coincidence that the historian Renato Constantino caught, and that almost nobody outside the Philippines has ever heard: Tañada was born on the exact day the United States and Spain sat down to arrange the theater that would deliver Manila into American hands. August 10, 1898. He entered the world on the morning the empire was finalizing its paperwork.
In Gumaca, Quezon — Tañada's hometown — August 10 is observed every year as Lorenzo M. Tañada Day, a special non-working holiday, with commemorations held near the marker of his birth. He is buried in Marikina, in the same Loyola Memorial Park where the National Artists Fernando Amorsolo and Vicente Manansala rest.
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Kasarinlan — kah-sah-REEN-lan
Independence; sovereignty. Built from sarili, the self — literally the condition of belonging to oneself. It is a heavier word than the English "independence," which only says what you are free from. Kasarinlan says who you belong to. This was the word Tañada spent his life on.
The Battle That Was Not a Battle
By the first week of August 1898, the Spanish position in Manila was hopeless and everyone involved knew it. Commodore George Dewey had destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1. Major General Wesley Merritt had arrived in late July with American ground troops. And Emilio Aguinaldo's revolutionary army — which had been fighting Spain since 1896, well before any American warship appeared — had the city surrounded by land.
On August 7, Dewey and Merritt sent Governor-General Fermín Jáudenes a joint notice giving him forty-eight hours to move noncombatants out of the city. Jáudenes replied that he was encircled by Aguinaldo's forces and had nowhere to send them. He then asked for time to consult Madrid.
On August 10, the Americans refused. In a letter sent from Manila Bay that day and signed by both commanders, they declined to grant the delay. It is in the record, in their own words, in the exchange of letters that led to the surrender.
What was happening in parallel was not in the record. Through the Belgian consul Édouard André, Jáudenes had proposed something extraordinary: Spain would surrender Manila to the United States after a staged battle — enough shooting to satisfy Spanish military honor, and, crucially, an arrangement that would keep the Filipino revolutionary army out of the walled city. Dewey had initially declined for lack of troops to block the Filipinos. Once Merritt's men landed, he agreed. The details were settled on August 10.
The plan was precise. Dewey would shell only Fort San Antonio Abad, a decrepit structure on the southern edge of the city. Spanish forces would withdraw. Filipino forces would be checked. American troops would advance. When enough of a show had been made, Dewey would hoist a signal asking whether the Spanish surrendered, and a white flag would appear at a spot the two sides had agreed on in advance. They exchanged sketches of the building and the flags.
Bad weather pushed the operation back. The mock battle was fought on August 13, 1898. Manila changed hands. Filipino soldiers who had besieged that city for months were kept outside its walls while it was handed to a new occupier.
The Boy in Gumaca
That same day, in Gumaca — then part of Tayabas province, now Quezon — Vicente Tañada and Anastacia Martinez had a son. Vicente was the last gobernadorcillo of the town under Spanish rule, a local official of the order the Americans were about to replace. Lorenzo was their fourth child.
Constantino, the great nationalist historian, was the one who noticed what the date meant. Writing in 1986, he observed that Tañada was born on the day Dewey and Merritt were supposed to begin their assault, and that the weather pushed the mock battle three days later.
— Renato Constantino, Malaya, August 17, 1986
It is the kind of line that could be merely clever. It is not, because of what Tañada then did with the ninety-three years he was given.
A life measured against an occupation
He grew up under the American colonial government. At De La Salle in Manila, where he was one of only a handful of brown-skinned students among the sons of foreigners and mestizos, he formed an all-Filipino trio and later dated the beginning of his nationalism to that grouping. As a law student at the University of the Philippines he was chosen to speak at an Armistice Day program in 1923; when the American ROTC commandant buried him last on the roster and then cut the program short, Tañada walked up to the university president and insisted on his right to speak — partly, he said, because his mother had come all the way from Gumaca to hear him, though she understood no English. He told the cadets that if the United States would not grant independence, Filipinos should be ready to fight for it.
He was Solicitor General twice, and after the war he prosecuted collaborators. In 1947 he ran for the Senate as a newcomer and topped the field. He stayed twenty-four uninterrupted years, through four terms, and made a reputation as a graft-buster willing to expose his own colleagues. He authored the picketing law that protected workers on strike. He sponsored the law that moved Philippine Independence Day from July 4 — the American date — to June 12, the date of Aguinaldo's 1898 proclamation. That single act is a decolonization of the calendar itself.
He retired in 1971. Martial law was declared the following year while he was abroad, and the retirement did not hold. He came back and became, in his seventies and eighties, a street protester. He chaired LABAN. He co-chaired a national coalition for workers' rights with the labor leader Bert Olalia. After Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in 1983 he led the Justice for Aquino, Justice for All movement. Organizers who came to ask an eighty-something man with a cane to join a rally against the dictatorship were given one condition: he would not run when the police came.
And through all of it, the bases. Tañada headed the Anti-Bases Coalition, launched in 1983. He argued that the American installations were not there for Philippine democracy but for American interests in the Pacific, and that U.S. support was what kept Marcos standing long after he had lost any legitimacy. He was not a man with a narrow grievance. He defined nationalism as a habit of the intellect as much as the will — a nationalist, he wrote, is not only one who is ready to die for his country but also one who is ready to think for his country.
September 16, 1991
The 1947 Military Bases Agreement had originally run ninety-nine years, later cut to twenty-five, set to expire on September 16, 1991. A new treaty would have given the United States ten more years at Subic. President Corazon Aquino — whom Tañada had campaigned for in 1986 — lobbied for it, and marched to the Senate to call for it.
On September 16, 1991, the Senate rejected the treaty 12 to 11. Outside, in heavy rain, the crowd was reported at something on the order of 170,000. The twelve senators were dubbed the Magnificent 12.
One of the twelve was Wigberto "Bobby" Tañada. Lorenzo's son.
The father had left the Senate twenty years earlier. He could not cast that vote. His son cast it for him. Ka Tanny's last public fight, according to the scholarly account of his life, was against the ratification of that very treaty in September 1991 — and he lived to see it fail. He died eight months later, on May 28, 1992, at ninety-three, and the cortege went through Quezon City to Marikina. Aquino, who had been on the other side of that vote, eulogized him as a teacher of the Filipino will to be free.
- August 10, 1898 — Merritt and Dewey refuse Jáudenes time to consult Madrid; the mock-battle terms are arranged. Lorenzo Tañada is born in Gumaca.
- August 13, 1898 — The staged battle is fought. Manila passes to American control; Filipino forces are kept outside the walls.
- 1947–1971 — Tañada serves twenty-four uninterrupted years in the Philippine Senate.
- 1983 — The Anti-Bases Coalition is launched with Tañada as its head.
- September 16, 1991 — The Senate rejects the bases treaty 12–11. Wigberto Tañada is among the Magnificent 12.
- May 28, 1992 — Tañada dies at ninety-three. He is buried at Loyola Memorial Park, Marikina.
August 10, 1999: Chatsworth
One hundred and one years to the day after two empires settled Manila between them, a Filipino American named Joseph Santos Ileto was delivering mail in Chatsworth, in the San Fernando Valley.
He was thirty-nine. He had been born in the Philippines and came to the United States at fourteen. He was a substitute letter carrier — the one who covers other people's routes — and he had the day off until he was called in. He had been with the Postal Service two years and had recently received a special achievement award. He was studying engineering at Cal Poly Pomona. His postmaster remembered his sense of humor. His sister said he was the one who took care of their mother.
That morning, a white supremacist named Buford O. Furrow Jr. had walked into the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills and fired seventy rounds, wounding five people — three children, a teenage camp counselor, and a receptionist. He then drove a few miles and found Ileto returning to his postal truck. He asked Ileto to mail a letter. When Ileto agreed, Furrow shot him nine times.
Furrow later confessed that he killed Ileto because he took him for Latino or Asian and because he worked for the federal government. It is worth sitting with that. He did not know Joseph Ileto was Filipino. Ileto was killed for a category, by a man who could not be bothered to learn which one — and the specific offense was that he wore the uniform of the country he had immigrated to.
Congress named the post office in Chino Hills the Joseph Ileto Post Office. President Clinton, signing it, called Ileto a dedicated public servant killed because he was an Asian American working for his own government, and used the occasion to press Congress to pass hate-crimes legislation. That legislation — the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act — would not pass until 2009. The Ileto family spent those years organizing, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice still marks the anniversary with the family at his mural.
What August 10 Is For
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and cheap to draw a straight line from a sham battle in Manila Bay to a driveway in Chatsworth, as though a hundred years of history were a single causal arrow. It is not. Buford Furrow was a man with a rifle and a poisoned mind, not an instrument of policy.
But the dates sit on the same square of the calendar, and they ask a related question. In 1898, Filipinos were the subject of a negotiation they were not invited to, in their own capital. In 1999, a Filipino man was killed for a category he was assigned by someone who did not know what he was. In both cases the defining act was performed on Filipinos rather than with them. That is the through-line, and it is the one Tañada spent ninety-three years refusing.
He is the answer the date offers. Born on the morning the empire finished its arrangements, he lived long enough to see his own son vote it out — and he made the argument, every decade of his life, that a people is not a thing to be disposed of. My children were born in this country and are of it. So was Joseph Ileto's family. Loving a country and telling the truth about it were never opposites, and Ka Tanny is the proof.
There is a marker in Gumaca where he was born, and a grave in Marikina where I used to live. He is as old as the intervention. He outlasted it.
• Agnes G. Bailen, "Lorenzo M. Tañada: The Evolution of a Nationalist Leader," Philippine Political Science Journal, 1993–1994 (Philippine Social Science Council) — pssc.org.ph, quoting Renato Constantino, Malaya, August 17, 1986
• Senate of the Philippines, Former Senators biography: Lorenzo M. Tañada — legacy.senate.gov.ph
• Bantayog ng mga Bayani, "Senator Lorenzo 'Ka Tanny' Tañada" — bantayogngmgabayani.org
• "Letters Leading to the Surrender of Spanish Forces at Manila," primary correspondence, August 7–13, 1898 — spanamwar.com
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Battle of Manila Bay / siege of Manila — britannica.com
• U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, "The Fall of Manila, August 13, 1898" (August 1960) — usni.org
• Roland G. Simbulan, "The Historic Senate Vote of 16 September 1991," Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2018 — archium.ateneo.edu
• Rappler, "LOOK BACK: When the Senate said 'no' to US bases renewal" — rappler.com
• Congressional Record, Joseph Ileto Post Office designation, 1999 — govinfo.gov
• Clinton White House archive, statement on the Joseph Ileto Post Office — clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov
• Asian Journal, "Filipino postal worker Joseph Ileto remembered 20 years after killing" — asianjournal.com
• CBS News archive reporting on the Ileto killing and federal indictment, August 1999 — cbsnews.com
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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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